Hi, I recently installed Frodo on my Treo 650. I love it! I've only used it to play Jumpman so far and it's absolutely the most fun program I've ever installed on a Palm. Crossroads will likely be next.
I do have a couple issues with it, however. The first (and I'm not sure if this is due to a misunderstanding on my part about Palm's launcher) is that when I first installed Frodo to my SD card's /Palm/Launcher directory, the app would never remember any of its preferences from session to session. Memory is tight on my 650 so I'm trying to put everything I can on the SD card.
The second issue I had was with the file selection dialog. It seems rather confusing in that it lists both disks and session snapshots, and doesn't distinguish between the two. Likewise, it doesn't distinguish between things on the handheld and things on the SD card. I feel like sessions and disks should be kept separate - typically to switch games I'd want to select the active session snapshot for that game and have the current disk for that session be selected as part of loading the snapshot.
One strange, little issue: when I type the "at" sign on the Treo keyboard, that doesn't work in Frodo. I can use the on-screen keyboard to type "at" and I can type all the other symbols on my keyboard directly - just not the at sign. I'm guessing there's some key event->keyboard translation table somewhere that doesn't have that entry in there or something. (may I request that you provide an option to make the on-screen keyboard larger? Get rid of some of the indicators on the right and a bunch of the screen border space, and scale up the important parts of the keyboard as much as possible. Treo has a physically smaller screen than devices like the Tungsten T - I love that because it makes the device smaller, but it also makes it difficult to hit 8x8 pixel targets even with the stylus. :)
Another minor issue I just now discovered - if Frodo is running and the device goes into auto-sleep, the speaker will click every couple of seconds.
The only issue that I find really frustrating is that the disk images aren't reloaded when the snapshots are. This is especially problematic as I use the 5-way navigator as the joystick and the power button as the fire button - which means that there's four buttons in close proximity to my thumbs which are capable of exiting Frodo and launching something else if pressed. When I accidentally hit one of these buttons and Frodo exits, I then have to re-launch Frodo, and then re-attach the D64 which was attached before I exited Frodo. I've remapped a couple of these hardkeys to keyboard keys in Frodo in order to prevent this from interfering too much with gameplay - but there are only so many "innocuous" keys to which I can assign things (things like restore, shift, ctrl, etc., things which usually have no important job to do)
I can sympathize with the fact that you don't have infinite time to solve all these problems, and I applaud everything you've done to bring Frodo to PalmOS. Perhaps I'll find some time in the future to contribute some code - for now I think my project time is pretty much booked. :)
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Hi, I recently installed Frodo on my Treo 650. I love it! I've only used it to play Jumpman so far and it's absolutely the most fun program I've ever installed on a Palm. Crossroads will likely be next.
I do have a couple issues with it, however. The first (and I'm not sure if this is due to a misunderstanding on my part about Palm's launcher) is that when I first installed Frodo to my SD card's /Palm/Launcher directory, the app would never remember any of its preferences from session to session. Memory is tight on my 650 so I'm trying to put everything I can on the SD card.
The second issue I had was with the file selection dialog. It seems rather confusing in that it lists both disks and session snapshots, and doesn't distinguish between the two. Likewise, it doesn't distinguish between things on the handheld and things on the SD card. I feel like sessions and disks should be kept separate - typically to switch games I'd want to select the active session snapshot for that game and have the current disk for that session be selected as part of loading the snapshot.
One strange, little issue: when I type the "at" sign on the Treo keyboard, that doesn't work in Frodo. I can use the on-screen keyboard to type "at" and I can type all the other symbols on my keyboard directly - just not the at sign. I'm guessing there's some key event->keyboard translation table somewhere that doesn't have that entry in there or something. (may I request that you provide an option to make the on-screen keyboard larger? Get rid of some of the indicators on the right and a bunch of the screen border space, and scale up the important parts of the keyboard as much as possible. Treo has a physically smaller screen than devices like the Tungsten T - I love that because it makes the device smaller, but it also makes it difficult to hit 8x8 pixel targets even with the stylus. :)
Another minor issue I just now discovered - if Frodo is running and the device goes into auto-sleep, the speaker will click every couple of seconds.
The only issue that I find really frustrating is that the disk images aren't reloaded when the snapshots are. This is especially problematic as I use the 5-way navigator as the joystick and the power button as the fire button - which means that there's four buttons in close proximity to my thumbs which are capable of exiting Frodo and launching something else if pressed. When I accidentally hit one of these buttons and Frodo exits, I then have to re-launch Frodo, and then re-attach the D64 which was attached before I exited Frodo. I've remapped a couple of these hardkeys to keyboard keys in Frodo in order to prevent this from interfering too much with gameplay - but there are only so many "innocuous" keys to which I can assign things (things like restore, shift, ctrl, etc., things which usually have no important job to do)
I can sympathize with the fact that you don't have infinite time to solve all these problems, and I applaud everything you've done to bring Frodo to PalmOS. Perhaps I'll find some time in the future to contribute some code - for now I think my project time is pretty much booked. :)